And thanks for the tips - I completely agree on the point about data being held hostage, and on the openness of data - it's one of the more frequent complaints about Meetup. I've recently added an API for event creation, so it won't be hard to add another endpoint for listings (at the moment, we just have an embeddable widget [1] showing your next 3 events).

ICAL is a brilliant suggestion - I've had a few requests for that already, and it's especially interesting in the context of opentechcalendar. I'm very interested in ActivityPub and all things fediverse as well - figuring out how to integrate these ideas into the platform is one of the next items on my TODO list.

[1] https://radius.to/blog/embed-events-widget-website

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398

It's intended to be a sort of social network focused on IRL groups/communities and finding others with the same interests in the same area, and just building local communities in general.

It's currently still a part-time venture, but I'm planning a launch on HN soon to get input/gauge interest in the latest iteration. FWIW, I posted the initial version on HN just over a year ago and got a ton of amazing feedback, much of which I've incorporated over the last year - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40717398

I'd imagine you'd get pretty good results on both ProductHunt and Reddit as well if you can get enough upvotes, though the latter is pretty difficult to promote your products on these days unless it's legitimately relevant to the community you post in.

Yep, exactly! I've been trying to find a better term than "event" or "activity" for "things to do" or "things happening around you", but I think these phrases are the best I'll get. That's part of the problem with Meetup - it's fine(ish) for finding events of a certain type but there's so much other stuff that's not on there.

If you're looking for a way to fill the month ahead, or your weekend with stuff to do, you have to scout the info from tons of separate sources.

Thanks, that'd be awesome!

And that sounds like most of the experiences I've heard - their pricing options really aren't great.

> Once I started posting meetups, though, I started getting a lot of bogus signups. They were clearly bogus, as many had nothing to do with tech, or were unreasonably far away (like New Jersey or Upstate). I suspect most, if not all, were fake profiles. These signups filled the meetups, so I would get like, one real person showing up. All the rest were no-shows.

I know no-shows are a big problem but spam/fake sign-ups - that's a weird one, and not one I'd considered! Was this recently? I'd assume something like this would have been easy to fix by requiring email confirmation on your account sign-up.

I think the sign-up flow is super minimal/easy at this point, but I'd love any suggestions you've got in mind.

Relevant features I'll be adding to make it easier:-

- Sign-in with Google option

- Potentially simplifying the RSVP flow with an email magic link - someone suggested that here - https://github.com/radiushq/feature-requests/issues/10

> how certain are we this is not going to take the same path to profit than meetup

I'm pretty adamant about not copying Meetup's model and keeping a Free option available for Groups. I think having a Pro plan with additional features, and potentially taking a % of ticketing fees once we've added ticketing will be sufficient. Have a few other ideas around event listing promotion and group memberships but these aren't fully fleshed out yet.

Open to suggestions on how best to convey that I won't be going the Meetup route to profit!

Having thought about it a little, I'm going to try and address this by:-

- Adding a Pledge/Goals page with my plan for the platform

- Adding a Pricing page with Free and Pro (Coming soon) options

- Adding a "How are we funded" entry to the FAQ, explaining it's completely bootstrapped by me (whilst having a day job, hurrah), with a monetization plan of being funded by Pro plans, ticketing etc

- Publishing monthly financial data, open startup style (there won't be much in here currently aside from my Heroku bill) for additional transparency

I'm also considering the suggestion to add a "Support us" page for any groups/individuals who want to contribute to development efforts/running costs (though I'd be surprised if anyone would at this point.)

For 5. in particular, I have a general vision of what I want the platform to be but it's always changing with new ideas here and there, and also have to consider user feedback like you say. Keeping it simple, but useful is the goal instead of being a do-everything platform that you need a Phd to use (looking at you, Google Cloud Platform).

Likewise, sorry about that! I'll bump this up on the Trello board!

Thanks!

> But that website is cold and stark, the opposite of what a human-interaction should be. Find some (quality) stock photos of actual people to add to the landing page.

I have to agree! You should have seen previous versions...

I'll be adding some nice community-themed images/illustrations in the near future!

Hey, thanks! Much appreciated!

> Discoverability. meetup.com wins by having a list of events which is not just searchable and taggable etc, but also massive. So people just browse on there and find your event via their interests. That's a tough thing for any newcomer to compete with obviously.

Agreed. Initially, I planned to do similar to what RemoteOK did and aggregate listings from Meetup/Eventbrite/etc and just link back to the source directly, to gain traction. It seems like a legal grey area though so I'm hesitant to go that route, but it would solve that problem for me though.

I would love input on this from anyone with experience doing anything similar or who knows the legal ins and outs.